symlink.jnl

(Update: Since the writing of this post, I moved on to GNOME 3 with GDM, and ConsoleKit was replaced with systemd, so almost everything in this post is out-of-date. Even for those still using startx, the necessary setup is much, much simpler. – 2013-07-04)

Just spent three days getting the {Console,Device,Policy}Kit fuckery allow me to mount disks from Nautilus.

On the freenode IRC network, users can get "cloaks" (called "vhosts" elsewhere) signifying their status, group affiliation — or just to hide their real hostname. To avoid clashes with actual hostnames, Freenode's cloaks use slashes / as delimiters: such as freenode/staff/tomaw or archlinux/developer/wonder or unaffiliated/tan. Since you cannot have slashes in your real hostname, cloaks often are used to implement "groups" in access lists (*!*@freenode/staff/* +votsriRfAF is a common sight).

Except you can have slashes in your real hostname.

If you run your DNS server yourself, all it takes is check-names master ignore; in named's options to make it accept un-hostname characters in hostnames. (Apparently, the difference between a "hostname" DNS entry and a "non-hostname" one is the presence of an A or AAAA record. Hostnames are only allowed to have a-z 0-9 -.) The rest is as simple as:

$ORIGIN example.com.
DNS/is/fun AAAA 2001:db8::1337

...along with the corresponding PTR records in your reverse DNS zone.

(At the time of writing this post, freenode had been already fixed to reject users attempting this trick with their rDNS. I still sometimes regret not having connected with freenode/staff/grawity.nullroute.eu.org while I still could. – 2013-07-04)

So I'm stuck with Windows XP for a (long) while. (Pepsi and laptop harddrives do not mix.)

Several days ago, Windows started prompting for a filesystem check of C: during boot. Every single time I accepted, it would quickly jump to stage 2 (index check) and proceded with printing a ton of the same line:

Deleting an index entry from index $O of file 25.

It never finished cleaning up those index entries (I would always interrupt it after 50 or so minutes), and apparently those deletions it had made weren't written to disk either.

After several hours of googling and reading many pages of NTFS documentation (95% of the sites I found were exact copies of "Visual Basic NTFS Programmer's Guide" or the documentation from linux-ntfs), I found out that "file 25" was a NTFS metadata file, \$Extend\$ObjId, used for "open by unique ID" NTFS functionality. Checking with ntfsinfo showed $O being over 80 MB (the same index in another partition was about 12 megs).

So I did an experiment. I booted a Linux CD and removed $ObjId, sacrificing ~160 GB of music, movies and porn. When I returned to Windows, all files were still there and readable. chkdsk did complain about missing indexes, but it happily recreated them in several minutes.

(Update: Things have changed since writing this post. I now use GNOME 3 daily, and while Avahi is still completely useless for me, overall I have started preferring its simple design over ad-hoc broadcasts &c. – 2014-08-22)

Disclaimer: I have never used KDE. I'm currently writing this on Windows XP. My preferred WM is wmii. I also never participiate in any holy wars, be they OS-related or not.

GNOME has many components which some consider "bloat" and others just plain hate without any reason. Such as gnome-keyring, which many dislike mostly because NetworkManager requires it. But many of those components are a necessary evil.

Such as GVFS, for example. I really prefer a single, consistent interface that handles FTP and SFTP and SMB/CIFS and WebDAV to a bunch of separate mostly-fuse-based {ftp,ssh,smb,dav}fs things of varying reliability. Some of them are no longer maintained, others are buggy. Samba apparently has in-kernel CIFS support - but I have to use mount which requires either r00tness or editing fstab for every damn share. Sure, there's mount.cifs, which can work setuid-root, and which I have to manually chmod u+s everytime I upgrade.

Compare this to GNOME's GVFS, or KDE's Kio. I can open, say, smb://windozebox/music or sftp://nullroute.eu.org/~/.bashrc or even obex://[01:23:45:67:89:ab]/ in any GVFS-compatible program and it works. The filesystem is automatically mounted, using credentials stored in gnome-keyring. To the user there's no difference (other than speed) from a local file. Sure, it's like in Windows, where you open \\box\share\file.txt and it Just Works™. But does that automatically make it bad?

Similar is gnome-keyring. It's the only place, besides the rarely used ~/.netrc, that is actually a working centralized password store. It can even be used for X.509 certs, with any app that supports PKCS#11 (though it's still very beta). I'm tired of having to separately configure each program where to look for my SSL and S/MIME keys.

(Unfortunately, many programs carry that problem to Windows - Pidgin, for example - and even though Windows has a central store for SSL keys and root CAs, they cheerfuly ignore it and use C:\Program Files\FooApp\ca-certs\. I would be less angry if native Windows programs didn't do the same...)

What I do consider bloat: GNOME integrating Avahi into Seahorse and Epiphany. (Those actually depend on Avahi, not just recommend it.) Opera adding widgets and BitTorrent and IRC into a web browser (and very poor implementations at that). Twitter in iTunes. MSN "nudges" in Pidgin. GConf XML hell. The fuckton of X11 startup scripts. And so on...